Friday, March 30, 2007

...Well according to Aubrey de Grey it's just an engineering problem! TED blog has all the details and Aubrey has the beard. If you think that's bananas well I got the link from greenLAgirl while reading her piece on Chiquita's gun running antics. The irony is that many of the women who work on conventional banana plantations don't live very long because of all the pesticides they inhale. But there is an alternative: EU support for St Lucia's eco bananas, that are being marketed by supermarkets such as Sainsbury's.

...is a project to "develop tools and practices that would make the consumption of locally-produced and second-hand objects socially attractive on the web." It sounds like a great idea, using the web at a grassroots level. Thanks to Hobby Princess for the link to Doors of Perception. The project uses a free product code service called Thinglink, which is an open standard and service that anybody can use. Sounds like a great way to recycle.

Monday, March 26, 2007

...It is just over one month since blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman, 22, was the first Egyptian blogger to stand trial for views expressed on the internet. He has been sentenced to four years in prison. He is a secular critic of religion. There is a campaign to release him that uses his blogging nameKareem Amer.

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Friday, March 16, 2007

..."Getting stuck with a Scandinavian version of Google is seen as a smallprice to pay by those trying to hide their digital traces andcircumvent censorship on the net.

'I've a button in Firefox [the web browser] I click and my [data]packets go off encrypted to a network of volunteers and privatecomputers around the world,' says Danny O'Brien, internationaloutreach co-ordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), adigital rights pressure group.

'I get randomly routed through one of them and when I go to Google itmight talk to me in Swedish, but this is a way of getting round thesenational [blocking] filters.'" reports Chris Nuttallin San Francisco for the FinancialTimes.Tor isone tool that can cover your tracks. Welsh may even be better thanSwedish, or how about Latin or Sanscrit? My Latin master used to sendtelegrams (those were the days!) in Latin and had to explain to thePost Office that Latin is not a code but a language. The Post Officedid not allow secret codes in telegrams at the time.

"Thegoal of onion routing (OR) is to protect the privacy of the sender andrecipient of a message, while also providing protection for messagecontent as it traverses a network. Onion routing accomplishes thisaccording to the principle of Chaum's mix cascades: messages travel fromsource to destination via a sequence of proxies ("onion routers"),which re-route messages in an unpredictable path. To prevent anadversary from eavesdropping on message content, messages are encryptedbetween routers. The advantage of onion routing (and mix cascades ingeneral) is that it is not necessary to trust each cooperating router;if one or more routers are compromised, anonymous communication canstill be achieved. This is because each router in an OR network acceptsmessages, re-encrypts them, and transmits to another onion router. Anattacker with the ability to monitor every onion router in a networkmight be able to trace the path of a message through the network, butan attacker with more limited capabilities will have difficulty even ifhe or she controls one or more onion routers on the message's path."says the Wikipedia. There are many bloggers who could do with some of these tools in countries such as China, Egypt and Pakistan, so pass the word please.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

...from Britain's mainstream media ("The great global warming swindle"from Channel 4, where else?) who are trying to tell us that the sun dunnit and good old Homo sapiens had nothing to do with climate change. Svensmark, a Danish space scientist, has a pet theory for cosmic ray influence on climate change. What is it about the Danes? Old Forkbeard's been doing too much Amanita again! Get a life, television. The old scientificmechanistic model, took so long to wake up to climate change because itwas far too busy trying to make cosmic ray guns. Now we are moving to amore dynamic Weltanschauung and slowly becomingaware that our ancestors were not so stupid after all. Thanks to GentlemanHobbes for this piece of silliness.

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

...and I always wanted to know more about these guys. "Since its launch two years ago, Uncyclopedia, an addictive parody of Wikipedia, has grown into one of the largest Wikia-hosted wikis. In this interview with net , co-founder and college student Jonathan Huang reveals what it’s all about...If you print it out, it’s great for wrapping fish or lining your birdcage."